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The Eastern Question, Western Europe, and the Balkans in Fin-de-Siècle Literature A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Stoyan Vassilev Tchaprazov IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Professor Andrew Elfenbein, Advisor May 2009 © Stoyan Vassilev Tchaprazov 2009 i Acknowledgements I have had the privilege to work with a number of people while completing this project. My deepest gratitude I owe to Professor Elfenbein, my dissertation advisor, who has been an example for teaching and scholarly achievement since my first days at the University of Minnesota. He helped me shape the course of this project and generously provided me with his knowledge, time, and advice. I have benefited immensely from his always perceptive comments and suggestions on each part of my dissertation, as well as from his unfailing encouragement and moral support. My gratitude also extends to the other members of my dissertation committee: Brian Goldberg, Qadri Ismail and Anna Clark. Their sharp observations, insightful questions, and criticism were of significant help during the latter stages of this project. I should also thank Professor Andrei Pantev for agreeing to read a version of the first part of this dissertation. His encouraging words only strengthened my belief and interest in the project. Joseph Bauerkemper, a fellow graduate student, has been an incredible source of ideas and inspiration throughout graduate school. He read and commented on early drafts of some of the material in this dissertation, but more than anything, he has been a great interlocutor and a friend. I am also grateful to Nicolay Antov and Julia Musha, whose scholarly insights and knowledge of the Balkans helped me revise and contribute to parts of this project. My family has been a constant source of positive energy throughout the completion of this project. Ina, my best friend in life, gave me her time and advice whenever I needed them. I am greatly obliged to her for her numerous impromptu readings and comments on my dissertation. My mom and dad, who have always ii inspired me to work hard, were never tired of discussing my dissertation with me. I am particularly indebted to my father for all the time he spent with me on the phone during the completion of this project. He helped me not once or twice clarify what I wanted to say. His knowledge of how to do things, especially with words, was always unconditionally available for me to use. During the writing of this dissertation, I fell ill for a period of time. I thank every one of my friends, teachers, and family for their incessant support and encouragement during this hard period. Dr. Shepela, I cannot begin to thank you for everything you did for my health. I would like to thank the English Department at the University of Minnesota for awarding me a travel grant in the summer of 2007, which allowed me to conduct research in the archives of the Bulgarian National Library, as well as for nominating me for a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, which I was fortunate to receive in the last year of my graduate studies. I must thank as well Lauren Goodlad and Julia Wright who invited me to submit a version of the first part of this dissertation for publication in RaVoN . Vassi, thanks for all the love and smiles. iii Dedication To my Grandparents. iv Abstract Traditionally, the British Empire is studied through the lens of British imperial rule in Asia, Africa, or the Americas, while scholars brush aside what was the vortex of British foreign policy in the second half of the nineteenth century—the Eastern Question, or the question of what to do with the Southeastern European subject peoples of the “decaying” Ottoman Empire. Reading closely late nineteenth-century British and Balkan expository prose and fiction that deal exclusively with the Eastern Question, I demonstrate that in the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain’s foreign policy was formed not only in the context of its interests overseas, but also, and perhaps more significantly, in the context of other existing empires in central Europe, as well as in the near east, such as the Russian and the Ottoman. A defining concern of this dissertation is also to demonstrate that the Balkans’ image of the other within Europe is largely a post-Enlightenment Western European construction that was discursively hardened at the end of the nineteenth century by both Western European and Balkan intellectuals. In discursive terms, I claim, this image was virtually parallel to Orientalist constructions of Western Europe’s colonial territories in Asia or Africa. My claim stems from reading in dialogue late nineteenth-century Western European texts (Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Bram Stoker’s Dracula ) and Balkan texts (Aleko Konstantinov’s Bai Ganio and Dobri Voinikov’s The Misunderstood Civilization ). I position these texts in relation to a critical discourse of nationalism and empire, as well as examine how these texts reflect or reconstruct these notions’ accepted meanings and connotations in the second half of the nineteenth century. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements . i Dedication . iii Abstract . iv Introduction: “Who is European and Who is Not” . .1 Part I: “The British Empire Revisited Through the Lens of the Eastern Question” . 19 Part II: Chapter 1: “ Arms and the Man : Bernard Shaw and the Bulgarians” . .44 Chapter 2: “Representations of the Balkans in Bram Stoker’s Dracula ” . .. .74 Part III: “Western Europe Through the Eyes of Two Nineteenth- Century Balkan Writers” . 110 Conclusion . 145 Works Cited . 151 1 Who is European and Who is Not Upon Bulgaria’s admission into the European Union (EU) on January 1, 2007, a Bulgarian friend of mine made the following remark: “Now that we have become members of the EU, it will either dissolve or we will become the first nation in the history of the EU to lose its membership.” Underlying my friend’s wry joke—which may very well prove prophetic—was the suggestion that Bulgaria was not ready to “join” Europe, that it was the bad student who would not only slow the learning and progress of the rest of the class, but also disrupt its normative behavior and potentially destroy it. Such an opinion is hardly new or an outlier in Bulgarian public discourse because it rests firmly on a long tradition of imagining Bulgaria as a European outsider. While European by geography, rarely has Bulgaria been viewed or classified as a European state, including by the Bulgarians themselves, who are yet to stop saying that they are going to Europe, when they refer to a trip to France, Britain, or Germany. The closest Bulgaria has been to European status in European historiography is when it was called Eastern-European (some still label it so), but that was an appellation mostly used during the years of the Cold War to emphasize Bulgaria’s membership in the Eastern Bloc, rather than its European status as such. Both before and after the Cold War, Bulgaria has most frequently been categorized as Balkan, an appellation that has come to have a number of denotations, none of which, however, is a synonym of European. Why name a geographically European state, such as Bulgaria, Balkan, and not European; what makes a state Balkan; and what are the implications of calling a state Balkan? This dissertation searches for answers to these questions by looking at patterns of representation of the Balkans in both Western European and Balkan literature from 2 the end of the nineteenth century—the period that in many ways not only defined, but cemented the Balkans’ status as the internal other of Europe. Western Europe, I argue, produced an image of the Balkans that not only echoed, but at times openly mirrored that of the “backward,” “inept,” “ignorant” colonial other, which is regularly found in post-Enlightenment Western colonial discourse. Fin-de siècle Balkan intellectuals only added force to that image, for whether they agreed or disagreed with its denotations and implications, they imagined their own identity through or in relation to that image. The distinction between Balkan and European, not as geographical designators, but as abstract notions, as concepts, is hardly debatable today. As defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED ), “Balkan” “alludes to the relations (often characterized by threatened hostilities) of the Balkan states to each other or the rest of Europe.” “European,” meanwhile, according to one OED definition, “designat[es] a notional or prospective union or association of the European countries.” The denotative difference between the two concepts is obvious: “Balkan” implies discord and division through force and opposition, while “European” implies unity. But this is only one of the numerous differences that distinguish the two concepts. In the post-Enlightenment period, both concepts developed meanings that were almost mutually exclusive, and thus became signature products in Western Europe’s arsenal for promoting its claims to cultural, political, social, and economic superiority. For centuries, Western European literature and public discourse have generally produced the Balkans as Europe’s other within, as the under-grown and uncultured distant cousin, who gives the rest of the European family a bad name. Such was not the case, however, when the word “Balkan” was still a neologism in European 3 vocabularies. Most historians agree that the word was introduced in Europe by the Ottomans. According to Maria Todorova’s detailed etymological account of the word, “Balkan” can be found in European texts as early as 1490 in the writings of Filippo Buonaccorsi Callimaco, an Italian humanist and writer who visited the Ottoman capital on diplomatic missions.

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